Identity Cards Bill

The simple facts are that the Government say that ID cards will be introduced voluntarily, yet the 80 to 85 per cent. of the British population who possess passports will, if the Bill is passed, have an ID card foisted on them in coming years whether they like it or not. By refusing to acknowledge the blindingly obvious—that a measure applied by stealth compulsion on the vast majority of the British people could never be described as voluntary by any known use of the English language—the Government seem to have turned their back on the most elementary terms of rational debate. The Home Secretary seems to inhabit a curious back-to-front world, worthy of C.S. Lewis, where words simply do not mean what they used to—